Thinking in Platforms: Platform engineering as the operating model for work in the AI era

Leading organizations think in platforms. They understand what most still miss: work can be designed, operated, and improved as a production system.

They do not leave recurring work to scattered tools, informal coordination, meetings, tickets, and heroic individuals. They design the system around knowledge work, turning repeated intent into reliable outcomes at scale.

This is the promise of platform engineering.

Thinking in Platforms shows how a practice born in software development becomes a broader discipline for redesigning work itself. AI accelerates this shift. Humans and agents cannot operate reliably inside fragmented systems. They need clear interfaces and reusable capabilities, shaped in a repeatable manner as paths.

For leaders, builders, and operators, this book offers a conceptual model and practical playbook for redesigning how modern organizations work. It applies to the fields of software, marketing, sales, finance, legal, or any other form of knowledge work.

The next productivity wave belongs to organizations that think in platforms.

Kaspar von Grünberg and Luca Galante are among the leading voices in platform engineering. Their work combines hands-on enterprise platform building, primary research across hundreds of organizations, and the experience of founding companies and building products in the field.